Yes, that’s an astounding fact. 

But here’s the scoop – it’s not just a marketing tech fiesta; every corner of the B2B world is buzzing with competition, especially in the post-COVID digital boom.

What does this mean?

If you’re steering a digital ship in the B2B sea, you’ve got to be tip-top in what you offer and how you offer it. Any hiccup in meeting your website visitors or potential customers’ expectations along the sales cycles is an open invitation for your rivals to swoop in.

That’s why, more than ever, it’s high time to bet big on conversion rate optimization (CRO) to plug leaks in your conversion funnel and ensure your competitors don’t sneak in and snatch your share. 

In this blog post, you’ll delve into essential concepts, effective strategies, and the utilization of VWO as a powerful tool for B2B conversion rate Optimization (CRO).

So, buckle up, and let’s dive in.

What is B2B conversion rate optimization?

Conversion rate optimization in B2B entails fine-tuning the website or any digital touchpoint experience. This optimization is rooted in behavioral or analytical data, aiming for a substantial uplift in the website’s overall performance. The desired improvements extend to key metrics, be it ROI, lead generation, or achieving any other specific business objective. 

Given the elongated purchase cycles in B2B scenarios, CRO takes on added significance. Maintaining a consistent and relevant digital experience is paramount. On top of this, even a minor dip in conversion rates can reverberate significantly in terms of monetary value. So, optimizing for success is not just a preference; it’s a strategic imperative!

Let’s delve into how conversion rate optimization campaigns are practically executed, using the example of VWO, a B2B SaaS product that is into CRO and experimentation.

After creating a hypothesis for increasing conversion based on behavior and web analytics data of the home page, you can run several CRO campaigns like,

• Content optimization campaign: Crafting new H1 heading (Optimize digital experiences & maximize conversions) and text to enhance keyword ranking, focusing on primary terms such as A/B testing, personalization, etc.
• A/B test campaigns: Experimenting with new colors or text for “Request Demo” and “Try VWO for Free” calls-to-action (CTAs). Testing variations in the navigation menu or lead generation forms that pop up after clicking both CTAs.
• Personalization campaigns: Tailoring content based on client backgrounds, personalizing H1 heading based on the client’s industry like Edtech, eCommerce, etc.
• Server-side experimentation campaign: Conducting complex experiments, especially after visitors transition to paying customers, like testing the B2B product features.
• Website experience enhancement campaign: Enhancing the SaaS website experience by adding interactive widgets, chatbots, pop-up forms, etc.

These CRO campaign types are just to give you an idea and are not exhaustive. All these campaigns aim to make the visitor’s experience delightful and increase the likelihood of conversions. Now let’s explore some strategies to inspire your B2B conversion rate optimization efforts.

Five B2B conversion rate optimization strategies

Exploring the B2B landscape involves a distinct set of challenges, especially given the significant financial stakes in play. In B2B scenarios, a lead’s decision to sign up or engage with a salesperson is a result of careful research and a detailed analysis of the capabilities and success track record of the B2B product. Additionally, they seek a seamless experience that allows them to efficiently move to the next steps, such as scheduling a call or accessing valuable resources like whitepapers. In light of this distinctive context, here are some effective B2B CRO strategies.

a. Use a customer data platform (CDP) for comprehensive data insights

A CDP consolidates data from multiple sources, processes it, combines it, and cleans it, providing a comprehensive view of individual customer profiles or datasets for behavior trends.

The significance of a CDP lies in laying the foundation for all your CRO programs. By deriving insights from data-backed hypotheses, you gain the ability to monitor the entire customer journey and identify weaknesses within it. This is instrumental in crafting effective CRO strategies.

While a CDP itself might not directly pique the interest of potential clients or address their queries, it serves as a powerful tool for understanding the reasons behind challenges in engaging or converting them. It acts as a diagnostic tool, allowing you to uncover insights to inform targeted strategies to enhance customer experience and drive conversions. 

For example, your CDP report highlights an underperforming segment from Japan, identified through data from web analytics tools like GA4. To delve deeper into the issues faced by this segment, you integrate your CDP with a behavior analytics tool. On the behavior analytics tool, you can watch heatmap session recordings for the corresponding segment to gain deeper insights. 

For instance, if the heatmap reveals a significant drop-off in the testimonial section, it indicates a potential trust issue. In response, you can tailor your content strategy by adding testimonials from Japan or incorporating ratings from trusted sources in the region. Alternatively, if the drop-off occurs in the first-fold, you may need a dedicated landing page for the Japan geography.

So, you see, the CDP serves as a central hub for streamlined data management. It allows you to speed up the process of pinpointing user problems, understanding their behavior intricacies, and derive actionable insights. Armed with this information, you’re well-equipped to create targeted and engaging CRO campaigns that directly address the pain points identified through the data analysis process.

b. Showcase the product’s credibility through the copy and website elements.

Potential clients often delve into the history and past performance of a company during the early stages of product research. Therefore, your landing pages should strategically convey the credibility of your product through compelling copy.

Take, for instance, the landing page of Semrush.

Semrush strategically showcases that its product is trusted by a multitude of companies, including a significant number of Fortune 500 companies. What’s noteworthy is that the credibility isn’t merely asserted through text; it’s backed up with compelling statistics.

As a B2B company, crafting copy for your website landing page that effectively highlights your credibility is a crucial step. Consider A/B testing different variations of your copy to gauge the impact it makes on your audience. For example, Basecamp, a project management software, conducted A/B tests with a variation of their landing page featuring a copy showcasing their client base in the first fold. The result? An average uplift of 7.82% based on four tests.

c. Utilize generative AI tools to scale up CRO

Generative AI is rapidly transforming various business functions, and CRO is no exception. This innovative technology is revolutionizing key aspects of CRO, such as data collection, customer feedback/delight, experimentation, and personalization, leading to faster and more effective results in meeting customer expectations and enhancing their experience.

Take, for instance, Intercom’s use of generative AI in the form of a chatbot named Fin. Visitors can interact with Fin to seek answers to their queries. While promoting Fin is one goal, it also serves the purpose of providing potential leads with quicker resolutions to their inquiries.

With this approach, potential leads experience shorter waiting times—seconds rather than minutes. This automation contributes to optimizing human resources by reducing the workload on the marketing and sales teams. Furthermore, potential clients benefit from quicker doubt resolution, streamlining their research process and increasing the likelihood of moving forward with free trials, demos, or sales calls.

Another example of a generative AI-based tool for CRO is VWO Testing-Web. It allows you to generate optimization ideas based on website pages, reducing the time spent on the idea generation stage and easing the strain on the CRO team. This tool provides actionable hypotheses for pages, streamlining the CRO team’s work and increasing the A/B test rate while ensuring test quality.

If you are interested, you can learn more about this AI-based product update.

Embracing generative AI in your CRO strategy brings forth a wave of efficiency, innovation, and quicker responses, ensuring a seamless journey for your potential leads. Whether it’s Intercom’s Fin providing instant answers or VWO Testing-Web streamlining hypothesis generation, these AI-powered tools open doors to faster optimization and enhanced user experiences. As you venture into the realm of CRO, consider integrating these cutting-edge solutions to stay at the forefront of technological advancements and elevate your conversion optimization initiatives.

d. Build an experimentation loop for lead generation

For any B2B organization, inbound marketing lead generation from the website is a pivotal aspect. Instead of conducting random A/B tests, relying on an experimentation loop proves more effective. 

But what exactly does the experimentation loop entail? It’s a systematic process where you conduct an initial A/B test and then proceed to run a subsequent experimentation campaign based on hypotheses derived from the results of the preceding test. Let’s understand it through an example.

Imagine you have a standard first-fold landing page featuring an H1 heading, followed by subtext, and a clear call-to-action (CTA) prompting visitors to either book a demo or avail of a free trial. It might look something like this:

Now, let’s say you conduct a standard A/B test, perhaps altering the H1 heading or subtext. Upon concluding the test, you observe an improvement in the conversion rate of the CTA. Instead of concluding the experimentation process, the experimentation loop approach involves delving deeper into the A/B test reports using various filters and segments. 

For example, your analysis may unveil that a particular geographical segment is lagging in performance compared to others. In response, you can kick off a personalization campaign specifically tailored to this geography. Alternatively, you might initiate another A/B test, adjusting headings to incorporate keywords relevant to the target audience in that specific region or include product information that resonates with this particular segment. This strategic iteration is likely to deliver an additional boost to your conversion rate. 

By adopting the experimentation loop approach, you not only capitalize on the positive outcomes of your initial A/B test but also harness the insights gained to refine and optimize further. This iterative process ensures a more nuanced understanding of user behavior, allowing you to implement targeted strategies that address specific challenges or opportunities uncovered during the initial testing phase.

e. Make your lead generation form less overwhelming with a multi-step format

At the heart of any digital interaction lies the lead form—a pivotal element that marks the initiation of a potential business relationship. To foster a seamless journey for customers venturing into this realm, the lead generation process must be user-friendly and facilitate progression to the next steps, such as booking a demo call or accessing a free hands-on demo.

While the ideal scenario involves a concise form with fewer fields, many B2B companies face the challenge of seeking extensive information to deliver a highly personalized experience in subsequent stages. However, presenting a single form with numerous fields may overwhelm visitors, resulting in drop-offs.

To address this dilemma, a strategic approach involves implementing a multistep lead generation form. This innovative solution breaks down a multi-field form into manageable segments, mitigating the perceived intimidation and creating a positive user experience. By allowing customers and leads to input their information in smaller, more digestible chunks, this approach enhances user satisfaction and, ultimately, boosts conversion rates.

A compelling illustration of the effectiveness of a multistep lead generation form is evident in the case of VentureHarbour, a bootstrapped venture studio. The firm strategically implemented a multi-step signup form on its website, orchestrating the sequence to commence with steps that demanded minimal effort to complete.

The impact was remarkable. The transition from a single-step to a multi-step form made their conversion rate vary from a modest 0.96% to an impressive 8.1%, underscoring the potency of this approach in significantly enhancing user engagement and average conversion rate.

Moreover, incorporating periodic analysis of the form using form analytics tools allows you to closely monitor its performance. By leveraging insights gained through analysis, you can formulate hypotheses to further improve the form and initiate targeted CRO campaigns for continuous optimization.

When it comes to achieving success in B2B CRO, crafting a solid plan is imperative. The strategies discussed above can greatly enrich and guide you toward your goals. However, having the right tool is crucial for effective implementation. If you’re still in search of the ideal tool or considering alternatives, here’s essential information about VWO that you shouldn’t overlook.

Using VWO for effective B2B conversion rate optimization

From behavior analysis to personalization, VWO stands out as a comprehensive CRO platform, offering a diverse set of features to elevate your CRO endeavors. Leveraging VWO Insights, you can employ scrollmaps, heatmaps, form analysis, and surveys to gain insights into visitor behavior and understand the reasons behind drop-offs. The seamless integration allows you to transition from behavior analysis to creating hypotheses directly within the same dashboard. Subsequently, you can execute A/B tests using VWO Testing or run a FullStack A/B test. 

Also, VWO enables you to launch personalization campaigns through VWO Personalize. What sets VWO apart is its incorporation of VWO Data 360 (CDP), facilitating easy data management.

Adding to its impressive array of capabilities, VWO embraces generative AI to generate optimization ideas, create survey reports, suggest text, and promise much more in its evolving pipeline of features.

Curious about the success track record for B2B organizations? Let’s delve into a compelling case study involving VWO Experimentation Suites.

Hubstaff, a B2B company specializing in time tracking and project management software received hundreds of thousands of visitors on the homepage. Thus, even a slight dip in the conversion rate could translate to significant revenue loss. To address this concern and elevate its conversion rate, Hubstaff turned to VWO.

The Hubstaff team kicked off the improvement process by conducting a comprehensive behavior analysis of the homepage using VWO Insights. The insights derived from this analysis prompted them to embark on a complete redesign of the homepage.

Here’s a glimpse of the original homepage:

And here’s the variation with the new design:

The test ran for three months, encompassing a total of 259k visitors across the two pages involved. The result? The variation recorded a remarkable 49% increase in sign-ups, showcasing the effectiveness of VWO experimentation suites.

If these results have piqued your interest and you’re eager to explore more of VWO’s capabilities, here’s a 30-day free trial for you. It grants access to all the features and capabilities that VWO has to offer. So, do give it a try. 

In conclusion

B2B CRO is a must for any business looking to thrive in the post-COVID digital landscape. Fine-tuning the website or any digital touchpoint experience based on behavioral or analytical data can lead to a significant uplift in the website’s overall performance. 

By implementing effective CRO strategies like using a CDP, personalization, A/B testing, content optimization, and website experience enhancement, businesses can provide relevant and necessary information to the B2B lead along with a hassle-free experience to move forward in the sales funnel. With the help of powerful tools like VWO, businesses can drive measurable results, keep up with conversion rate benchmarks, and stay ahead of the competition.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

There could be many reasons for decreasing conversions and low click-through rates. In this blog, we’ll concentrate on three common scenarios that might be causing issues, regardless of your industry.

i. Form flow woes: You have a multi-field form to generate leads, but it’s not performing well and falling short of achieving the business objective of lead generation.

ii. Engagement deficit: Your content isn’t engaging and converting visitors to leads.

iii. Navigation flaws: Users struggle to find products from your navigation menu that has multiple categories.

Before making alterations to the current user experience or launching A/B tests to address these issues, it’s crucial to have a precise understanding of what’s going wrong. The figures derived from a web analytics tool merely serve as symptoms; uncovering the root cause of the problem involves delving into the user experience when they decide not to convert. This is precisely where a behavior analytics tool proves to be invaluable.

So, how can a comprehensive tool like VWO Insights-Web with vast application assist in tackling these three challenges? Let’s delve into it with the help of three case studies featuring high-growth businesses that successfully overcame these issues using the tool.

Note: Here’s a guide for you to refer to when you come across various features of VWO Insights-Web in this blog. It provides details of how these VWO features work cohesively for behavior analysis.

Success stories: How brands harness VWO Insights-Web to transform challenges into triumphs

Qualicorp discovered a form-filling conundrum: Indistinct field names

Qualicorp, a healthcare organization based in Brazil, aimed to enhance lead generation and boost conversions on their health insurance plans page. However, the page was underperforming. Enter VWO Form Analytics from VWO Insights-Web, which proved instrumental in analyzing the user experience.

The form analytics features provided valuable insights into user pain points, tracking metrics such as hesitation rate, ragged clicks, dead clicks, completion time, completion rate, and more. Upon analysis, it became evident that one of the factors contributing to the low form-fill rate was the need for discernible field names during the form-filling process. This, in turn, resulted in fewer users making it to the health insurance plans page.

In response to this insight, Qualicorp implemented an A/B test featuring a new design. The results were impressive, with the new design boosting the conversion rate by a substantial 16.93% in the primary goal.

Read the full case study.

Encyclopedia Britannica Group found blue to be the most engaging link color

The Encyclopedia Britannica Group, a venerable institution with over 250 years of global knowledge leadership, strives to ignite curiosity and enhance engagement with its content to cultivate a robust user base and drive subscriptions.

To optimize their approach, the marketing team at the group employed A/B testing through VWO Testing, experimenting with three colors—red, orange, and blue (control)—for in-line article links, coupled with calls to action, to determine the most effective option. Subsequently, the team utilized VWO Session Recordings to delve into click behavior, and mouse flow in order to see how users perceived these different colors. 

During this analysis, a noteworthy observation emerged: many users attempted to click on words highlighted in blue, even though these words weren’t actual links. Recognizing this user behavior, the team decided to keep the blue color for the actual links, resulting in a remarkable 10% improvement in their click-through rate. 

Additionally, the team harnessed VWO On-Page Survey capability to uncover the most pressing inquiries users had about the topic. Armed with this valuable insight, the company took proactive steps by designing an accordion feature on its website, showcasing the top Q&As derived from the survey for each article. The outcome was impressive, with over 23% of users engaging with the accordion to access answers to their questions.

Read the full case study.

Shopclues improved the product searching process on the navigation bar by focusing on user feedback

Shopclues, a prominent e-commerce player in India catering to 42 million visitors, took a strategic approach to enhance its Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) initiatives. In a meticulous analysis of each element, the focus was on tracking conversion signals. The tool of choice for this endeavor was VWO Insights -Web, utilized to delve into user behavior on the category page.

Through VWO Heatmap analysis, it became evident that filters such as “new arrivals,” “best selling,” and “price sorting” were capturing the majority of user attention. Users had to navigate by clicking on these filters and then sifting through products to find what they were looking for.

To streamline this process, Shopclues’ CRO team leveraged VWO On-Page Surveys to directly gather feedback from visitors regarding these filters. Armed with valuable insights, a variation was crafted that eliminated the extra step for users. This new approach presented visitors with products matching their chosen filters right away in a horizontal display in the navigation.

The new top navigation bar delivered 50% more CTR. Not only did the improvement in visits-to-order (48% from the category page) translate to higher revenue, but it also improved the quality of visits.

Read the full case study.

These three case studies serve as compelling illustrations of how VWO Insights-Web proves to be a valuable tool in addressing common challenges across diverse industries. It excels in pinpointing the root causes behind low conversion rates, showcasing the versatility and effectiveness of this solution.

And does VWO Insights-Web stop here? Not at all; there’s more to explore and leverage.

Beyond optimization: VWO keeps a watchful eye on your user experience

Imagine you’ve honed your user experience using data from VWO Insights-Web or another tool, implementing a series of optimization campaigns over a quarter. As the quarter concludes, assessing the performance of these optimizations becomes crucial. How do you go about it? Well, VWO provides a solution – the Insights Dashboard. 

This tool empowers you to effortlessly track and analyze the effectiveness of your optimizations. The dashboard offers a comprehensive view, shedding light on friction points and experience scores derived from user satisfaction, delivering valuable insights into the performance of your enhancements.

Notably, you can easily identify pages with low scores and validate the reasons using heatmaps and scrollmaps. Furthermore, pinpointing visitor segments with low experience scores allows you to tailor customized plans for these segments.

This is just one application 

The dashboard is also invaluable in the early phases of behavior research, providing insights into friction points contributing to low conversion rates. 

Thus VWO Insights-Web provides comprehensive and versatile solutions throughout the entire lifecycle of website enhancement and optimization efforts. Let’s see what some of our clients have to say about the tool. 

Rave reviews: What users are saying about VWO Insights-Web

In conclusion

VWO Insights-Web is a tool that enables proactive and continuous monitoring of your website experience score. It empowers you to identify issues using features like heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and form analytics for low-performing pages and visitor segments. Once you formulate a hypothesis, you can seamlessly run an A/B test from the same platform and subsequently track the experience score. This makes it a one-stop shop for the entire experience optimization process.

So, if you’re ready to give it a try, here’s an all-inclusive 30-day free trial of VWO. It encompasses all the capabilities and features that will assist you in making informed business decisions when choosing an optimization tool.

No, they don’t wave a magic wand to score successes.

Among the strategies they employ, a common thread is placing customers at the core of everything they do. It all begins with tuning in and understanding how audiences navigate their websites and engage with their brands. And this naturally leads them to leverage behavioral analytics.

While anyone in an organization can explore visitor behavior, certain professionals absolutely need to delve into it because their work is rooted in deriving valuable insights from such analyses. And when they become pals with behavior analytics tools, they can do justice to the work they do. 

Product managers convert insights from visitor behavior into actionable steps for the development team to create features that visitors love.

Next, we have the marketers who identify conversion roadblocks and optimize them to maximize the return on marketing investments through behavior analysis.

Lastly, UX professionals leverage behavior analytics to craft intuitive, frictionless website journeys, addressing visitors’ pain points and needs. 

Their use cases may vary, but they recognize the value of analyzing visitor behavior for their company’s success. 

Continue reading to know in detail how each of these personas can benefit from using behavior analytics.

How Product Managers benefit from behavior analytics

Product managers are responsible for recognizing customer needs and improving the product, either by enhancing existing features or introducing new ones. It’s not just about meeting customer needs; they also make sure these improvements help achieve the overall goals of the business. 

They act as a link between customers and the development team, turning feedback into practical plans. This entire exercise requires a solid understanding of how visitors behave on their websites – indicating a lot about their needs, expectations, pain points, and aspirations. 

Prioritize features that users want

Wondering if your product has peaked and reached its best version? Well, that might not be the case. Visitor needs are ever-evolving, and it’s essential to stay tuned to their preferences. Some innovative ideas arise from their needs, ones you might not have considered. In such cases, using behavior analytics tools like surveys allows you to directly understand what they’re looking for.

But it’s not always a straightforward conversation. Sometimes, you have to observe their actions, pick up on subtle cues, and figure out how to enhance their website journey without them explicitly stating it. This is where tools like heatmaps and session recordings prove invaluable. 

Hot red colors on heatmaps indicate high engagement, while cool blue colors show low engagement. On the other hand, session recordings offer a comprehensive view of visitors in action—revealing where they pause, what they click, and more. This way, these tools help uncover the challenges visitors face, providing product managers with opportunities to create new features that align with evolving needs.

Increase feature adoption

Introducing cool features is fantastic, but the real magic happens when our visitors actively engage with them, doesn’t it? Now, how do we gauge their usage? Heatmaps and recordings step in to showcase how smoothly audiences interact with the new features. 

Let’s say you’re a product manager at a gaming company, and you want to see the audience’s reaction to a new feature showing interactive gaming tutorials and walkthroughs. By tuning into insights from visitor behavior, as unveiled by these tools, you can effectively assess how players are responding to the feature.

Are the heatmaps indicating less engagement in this area? Do recordings reveal that not many visitors are interacting with these tutorials? Delving deep into their behavior will help you determine at what stage of engagement the visitors are with your new product feature. This allows you to refine visitor experiences, encouraging them to embrace the feature with ease. 

Expedite bug fixes

Imagine you have a website selling various products, and customers often encounter broken links when trying out a new feature, such as viewing a product in a 3D setting on the product page. That’s a bug, and they happen in software. But the quicker these bugs are fixed, the happier users are. Swift bug resolution is essential for maintaining a seamless user experience. 

Behavioral analytics tools, such as session recordings and surveys, offer a proactive approach to bug detection and resolution. Suppose, when you observe in a recording that visitors are clicking the link and it shows as broken, it indicates a friction in their journey. This way, you know where the problem is, and you can take quick action. By leveraging these tools, product managers can promptly identify and prioritize fixing critical bugs, ensuring a more stable and reliable product for users.

Decrease support tickets

While efficient customer support is crucial, we should ensure that our product is so finely tuned from the get-go that our visitors face little to no problems to begin with. Consider a travel booking website where users occasionally encounter hiccups in the flight search process, leading to a surge in support tickets. 

Now, through heatmaps and surveys, the product manager gains a sneak peek into visitors’ sentiments and pain points during the booking journey. This way, they can proactively tackle specific challenges, like fine-tuning the search filters. This not only elevates the booking experience but also naturally reduces the number of support tickets, ensuring a smoother journey for visitors planning their trips right from the start.

A product manager’s strategy is rooted in creating a product that is intuitively designed, motivating visitors to make the most of the new features. Incorporating intuitive guides and tooltips within the product can preemptively assist visitors, reducing the likelihood of queries and support ticket submissions.

How Marketers benefit from behavior analytics

In today’s era where data fuels business growth, marketers zero in on a data-driven approach for sustained business growth. Hence, by investigating visitor behavior on websites, they uncover optimization opportunities and implement effective strategies. In doing so, they ensure maximum conversions from website traffic, contributing to businesses’ returns on marketing investments.

Reverse low conversions

The role of a CRO marketer is to decipher why website visitors may slip through the cracks without completing desired actions. Are there any friction points hindering them from following the expected conversion route? Heatmaps and session recordings shed light on visitor behavior, unveiling areas causing confusion or disinterest. By addressing these pain points, you can effectively reverse the trend of low conversions.

Let’s consider a scenario where your heatmap reveals a lack of engagement with the primary CTA button on your website. After adjusting its placement and design based on insights from session recordings, you’ll likely observe an increase in conversions.

Note: Qualitative research reveals the ‘why’ behind visitor behavior, explaining why visitors act a certain way on a website. However, before delving into qualitative insights, quantitative research provides the ‘what’ – identifying specific issues on the website. 

Once quantitative research uncovers problems like drop-offs and declining average page sessions, qualitative research comes into play to understand why visitors exhibit certain behaviors causing these issues. In all these scenarios, personas either proactively dive into behavior analytics to stay ahead of visitor behavior or turn to qualitative research after identifying problems in quantitative research (using tools like Google Analytics 4) for in-depth analyses.

Discover engagement gaps

Websites serve as intricate canvases, capturing the ebb and flow of visitor interactions. Ever noticed those quiet corners or pages where visitor engagement seems to dim? CRO marketers pinpoint and revive these areas of potential disengagement.

How’s that possible? By turning to behavioral analytics. Heatmaps highlight areas with low and high engagement, offering a detailed map of user activity. Meanwhile, session recordings delve into the subtle nuances of visitor disengagement, providing a playback of their journey on the website. Armed with this insightful palette, you can strategically enhance specific sections, improving the overall experience.

Consider a scenario where a clickmap signals low interaction with a crucial product description. By delving into the related session recordings, you hypothesize that bringing it above the fold could enhance visitor engagement, offering them maximum information for their purchase decision. Strategic adjustments like these demonstrate how marketers can effectively leverage insights to bridge engagement gaps and drive results.

Segment for personalization

Embracing a one-size-fits-all approach can spell disaster for any website’s conversion rates. Instead, you should uncover the unique behaviors within diverse visitor groups and tailor experiences to align with their preferences. To achieve this, employing a behavior analytics tool like VWO becomes essential—it allows you to delve into specific segments for personalizing experiences. 

For example, simply choose the segment you want to see the session recording for and create a targeted view of a specific page. Additionally, with advanced filters, you can gain insights into how various segments engage with forms and on-page surveys on your website. This wealth of information becomes the foundation for building your personalization strategy.

Suppose you apply a filter to form responses and observe that new visitors show the highest drop-off from your services website. You can brainstorm creative solutions such as introducing complementary offers or discounts to incentivize this specific visitor group to complete form submissions. By adapting your approach based on these insights, you tap into the power of personalization for improved conversion outcomes.

Refine messaging

Do you know what’s the best way to strike a chord with your website visitors? Talk the language your visitors really want to hear. It’s all about paying attention to how visitors behave on your website and tweaking your messages accordingly. 

And you can probably guess what helps you in this case? Yes, behavior analytics. Let’s say you have a real estate website, and you see on GA4 that visitors from urban areas are spending more time on modern condo listings than suburban homes. When asked through surveys what exactly they are looking for, you get to know visitors want to see more benefits of booking condos on your website. 

You can refine your messages on those condo pages, highlighting the verified sellers, affordable pricing, and perhaps emphasizing the nearby trendy spots. It’s like customizing your property listings based on what urban dwellers are truly seeking. Hence, behavior analytics empowers you to craft messages that resonate with potential buyers. 

Watch our webinar to discover how to write copies that solve visitors’ pain points and improve conversions. 

How UX Professionals benefit from behavior analytics

UX professionals play a crucial role in shaping how visitors experience a website. Starting with UX researchers, their responsibility is to deeply understand the needs, behaviors, and preferences of visitors. With these insights, UX designers create user-centric interfaces that are intuitive, visually appealing, and aligned with user needs. 

Throughout this journey, behavioral analytics serves as a valuable companion, supporting them every step of the way. This data-driven research and design approach ensures that decisions are well-informed, making the overall visitor experience effective. 

Uncover navigation bottlenecks

A visitor-friendly navigation structure isn’t just a fancy improvement. It can boost product or information findability by 72%. This is supposed to have a positive impact on the overall visitor experience. The key lies in employing behavior analytics tools to keep a close eye on how visitors interact with your website.

For example, imagine discovering through clickmaps that visitors are frequently clicking on a non-clickable element, clearly indicated by a conspicuous red color on your website. Concurrently, session recordings show instances of rage clicks followed by a subsequent drop-off. Based on these insights, your UX team can proactively address the challenge, delving into strategies to enhance navigation and ensure a smoother user journey on your website.

Expedite research with visual data

Trends are fleeting, and visitor preferences evolve rapidly. Therefore, the ability to promptly make well-informed decisions that align with current audience desires is crucial. 

Behavior analytics provides an immediate and comprehensive overview of visitors interactions on your platform, accelerating your research and design executions. For instance, imagine you manage a learning platform and observe through visual insights from heatmaps and session recordings that students tend to skip lengthy lecture recordings. 

To delve into the reasons behind this behavior, you initiate quick and focused surveys, efficiently collecting user opinions. The feedback indicates a desire for quizzes and community discussions in addition to traditional lectures, revealing the pulse of your visitors’ preferences.

Make targeted improvements

Understanding the unique needs of diverse user segments is crucial for tailored improvements. Behavioral analytics tools allow us to investigate and enhance the experience for specific visitor groups. 

Let’s say your UX team notices through qualitative research that mobile visitors often struggle with the checkout process on your eCommerce site. So, armed with these insights, your UX team optimizes the checkout flow, making it simpler for this segment to complete the purchase, ultimately enhancing their overall shopping experience.

Sounds like a hassle? If you’re thinking of skipping, remember the fact that personalization helps companies get 40% more revenue than those that don’t. This should motivate you to have your UX teams trained on behavior analytics if you have not already. 

Validate designs with user feedback

When a UI matches a visitor’s mental model, it feels intuitive and reduces the cognitive load on visitors. It aligns with their expectations, making it easier for them to navigate and interact with the interface seamlessly.

That’s why validating your UI with visitor feedback tells you that you are on the right track. Behavior analytics, like heatmaps and session recordings, play a critical role in understanding how users interact with the UI.

Consider a scenario where a UX team is working on the mobile version of a banking website. An increase in premature drop-offs as shown in Google Analytics tells you to identify potential friction points. Session recordings reveal users struggling to find the transaction history. Surveys further confirm that users expect the transaction history to be more prominently placed on the home screen. Subsequently, the UX team redesigned the layout to align with users’ mental models, resulting in a more intuitive and user-friendly interface. 

If you’re eager to contribute to your company’s growth through visitor research, our blog will guide you on how you can make a meaningful impact within your role. We’ve discussed examples to justify the perks of behavioral analytics – and guess what? It works in almost every industry! 

Just make sure to follow best practices, starting with quantitative research to identify problem areas. Then, move to qualitative analysis, document your learnings, and set the right goals you want to achieve based on the insights gained from visitor behavior. 

So, let’s say you have hands-on visitor insights, but you’re unsure whether you need them to reverse conversions or bridge engagement. In such cases, it might make little sense, and you could inadvertently encroach into another persona’s work territory

VWO Insights – Web: The go-to behavior analytics tool for businesses

VWO Insights – Web has always been at the forefront of visitor behavior analytics, providing businesses with profound insights into their websites. Recently, its power has doubled with the launch of the Insights dashboard, bringing your website’s overall engagement performance report to your fingertips. Now, you can view page-level heatmaps, session recordings, segments with the lowest user experience, and more.

And you know what else? We’ve integrated AI into surveys that generate questions for your surveys until you’re satisfied with the output. You also receive summarized survey responses with key insights, actionable for easy implementation of optimization ideas. To witness all these features in action, try a free trial with VWO. So, get ready to experience its magic and unveil more visitor insights than you could ever imagine. 

These two days had everyone in the business world talking. 

On the 11th of July, we bid farewell to the old Google Analytics after it faithfully served us for 11 long years. It’s a bittersweet goodbye – the comfort of familiarity versus the looming learning curve of its replacement Google Analytics 4. 

And on the 30th of October, Google pulled the plug on its once-mighty A/B testing tool, Google Optimize. The reason? It did not provide the features and services that have now become crucial to experimentation.

Now, there might be a concern among A/B testing enthusiasts because of these developments. With Google Optimize gone, they need an alternative platform to carry on with their testing activities. If they opt for a third-party platform, will it seamlessly integrate with GA4 for in-depth A/B testing analysis? Moreover, how seamlessly can they use GA4 audience data for running experiments in their testing platform? 

Given that both GA and GO have been Google products, this question of seamless integration didn’t pop up until now. 

In this blog, we provide answers to these questions and explain how VWO plays a role in addressing these challenges. Keep reading!

A/B testing analysis using GA4 – Is that possible?

Well, GA4 doesn’t come with an in-built A/B testing capability. But it does allow integration with third-party A/B testing tools. 

Keeping Google’s product line restructuring in mind, VWO introduced a two-way integration with GA4. Plus, to help businesses carry on with testing efforts, we also provided a quick migration from Google Optimize to VWO. You can read more about GO migration to VWO. 

A case study in point: Critique Jeu, a gaming and sports company, transitioned from Google Optimize to VWO and achieved a successful test. By experimenting with color changes in internal text links—shifting slightly from their brand color scheme—they observed a significant increase of 22.8% in clicks on internal text links.

How do you benefit from VWO<>GA4 integration?

VWO’s campaign data, including experiment variations, now appears in GA4 in real-time. This enhances the data in GA4 and simplifies audience creation using VWO data in GA4. Further, you can use this campaign data for launching activities using AdWords and retargeting. 

Earlier, combining these two platforms needed custom dimensions in Google Analytics, which had limited applications and demanded manual efforts. 

Imagine you manage a hotel booking website, and you’ve conducted a test on the booking form. It succeeded in driving more visitors to the cart page but didn’t significantly impact booking values. To reconnect with these cart page visitors, you plan to run retargeting ads, offering a 10% discount for bookings made within 24 hours. 

To achieve this, you can create a campaign audience in GA4 and initiate a retargeting campaign using Google ads. Also, you can conduct an in-depth audience analysis, segmenting them by demographic, location, traffic sources, and other criteria to optimize your marketing strategy further.

So, say you notice that visitors from specific regions or countries – European countries, for example – are more receptive to your offer, you can create location-specific discounts or promotions. 

Now, we talked about two-way integration sometime back.

Yes, you can run A/B tests by targeting audiences in your GA account. These audiences in GA are created based on similarity in their certain characteristics. So, for example, engaged users could be an audience group comprising individuals who have visited your website at least 5 times in the past month and have spent 5 minutes in each visit. 

These defined audience segments allow you to fine-tune your testing campaigns from VWO, aligning your marketing efforts with specific user behavior and characteristics. 

Let’s understand with an example. Suppose you own an e-learning website where users frequently view course details but don’t enroll. By transferring this audience data from GA4 to VWO, you can conduct an A/B test. In this test, you split the audience into two groups: the control group sees your current course page, and the variation group sees a revamped course page featuring testimonials, detailed lesson plans, and a short introductory video by the instructor himself. 

Alternatively, you can implement a personalization campaign by offering a bundle of two relevant courses for the price of one. 

Here’s an added bonus: You can deploy these experiences without IT involvement and with shorter lead times. Be it a small change, adding a new section, or a website section, you can get the work done hassle-free!

Watch the benefits of VWO’s 2-way integration with Google Analytics 4 in the webinar.

How can you leverage Google Analytics for your experiment setup?

Experiment, a feature absent in GA4 but present in our old Google Analytics, may seem a bit obsolete now. But let’s take a quick look back for those of you who are still interested. 

Tucked within Google Analytics’ Behavior section, you’d find the ‘Experiments’. Here’s how it worked:

1. Start by selecting an Objective: You could define a specific outcome to measure and determine the winning variation. Next, you had three options:

• Choose an existing Goal
• Select a site usage metric
• Create a new objective or goal if you don’t already have one set up

2. Once you’ve set your Objective, the next step is to add the URLs of the page variations you wanted to test.
3. Finally, add the script code to your page to start the experiment. 

How do you analyze your A/B test results with Google Analytics?

To analyze your A/B test results in GA4 is no rocket science. Let’s understand how you can go about it with an example. 

Suppose you want to boost bookings on your e-Health website. You decide to promote the ‘Same-day consultation’ offer through three distinct formats: a status banner, a side pop-up, and a modal on your website. Once you’ve segmented audiences in GA4 for each format, you can establish comparisons to evaluate their respective responses. 

You can add and tailor your metrics for a more in-depth performance analysis In this example, you can compare audiences based on metrics like successful bookings, booking abandonment rates, consultation duration selection, and so on. 

Need a step-by-step guide on how to study A/B test results in GA4? Read our guide and get all your questions answered. 

Conclusion

Google’s product line restructuring has brought some big changes for businesses. But don’t worry, dealing with these changes can be easy if you’re smart about it. 

First of all, you can ease into the GA4 learning curve using Google’s handy learning materials. And as for your A/B testing programs – they’re in good hands. Even though GO has sunsetted, you’re in luck because you can easily migrate all your campaigns to VWO in less than a few seconds. Plus, VWO and GA4 integrate nicely together to help you get the best of both worlds. 

So, keep your testing engine running and keep moving forward. Good luck! 

Disclaimer: The synergy between VWO and GA4 enhances your A/B testing analytics, but potential data discrepancies may occur due to differing handling methodologies between platforms. This is not specific to VWO and can happen with any tool, as each has its unique setup. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Luckily for us, the reality is different. The strategic implementation of cutting-edge customer behavior analysis tools has helped numerous brands overcome these hurdles and position themselves to thrive in the ever-evolving market dynamics.

Leveraging user behavior analysis for transformative improvements

To maximize customer insights and strategically prioritize growth, companies have customer analysis tools at their disposal. These can be used to define clear goals and key metrics, implement robust tracking mechanisms, meticulously segment user data, and discern meaningful patterns in user behavior. 

VWO Insights – Web, has the power of features like session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and form analytics. It goes beyond mere observations to dive deep into user interactions, identifies issues with surgical precision, and provides actionable insights that shape the very fabric of design decisions. 

You can browse all sessions of a visitor in a single hub to understand their complete journey. You no longer need to miss any intricacies of their journey – in fact, you witness firsthand how they navigate and experience your website. 

Say, for instance, your goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of a new user interface and identify opportunities to enhance the visitor journey.

You begin by accessing the session recordings tool to observe user interactions on the website. The focus is on users who successfully complete a purchase, aiming to understand their journey from landing on the homepage to completing the checkout process.

You can see whether your users navigate easily through your redesigned homepage – whether the simplified layout and clear call-to-action buttons contribute to a positive first impression. You can check how quickly visitors find the product categories they are interested in, and note down instances of confusion or hesitation.

If session recordings and heatmaps highlight users smoothly browsing through product pages, you can check whether the transition from product selection to cart management is as seamless as you’d like. The clickmap, scrollmap heatmap, and session recordings all come in handy to analyze the efficiency and placement of the add-to-cart button. 

You can also evaluate the checkout process if you notice an increase in abandoned carts. How are users progressing through the checkout steps? Session recordings can show any issues they encounter giving you the opportunity to brainstorm optimization ideas like adding clear progress indicators, concise form fields, or the option to save payment information.

With a quick setup and a free trial, you can harness the comprehensive analytics offered by VWO Insights – Web to guide transformative improvements on your website, ensuring a digital experience that resonates powerfully with your audience. 

In the following section, we present 3 case studies of high-growth brands that used VWO Insights – Web to fast-track their UX goals. 

Success stories: The power of surveys, session recordings & heatmaps

Bear Mattress identified issues with their product detailed pages: low click activity, less interaction with products, non-engaging copy

Bear Mattress, a sleep wellness trailblazer, sought to elevate its revenue game by tapping into cross-selling opportunities. Teaming up with VWO, they embarked on a strategic journey to optimize their website and boost conversion rates, aiming to redefine the sleep experience for their diverse customer base, spanning athletes to professionals.

Honing in on the ‘Cross-sell Flow’ on mattress product detail pages, Bear Mattress identified challenges with the help of VWO Insights – Web. 

The following observations were made:

• Not many people clicked on the ‘Frequently bought with mattress’ section that shows other products you might like. Compared to other parts of the page, not many clicks happened on those suggested products, as seen in the heatmap.
• In the ‘Frequently bought with mattress’ part, there were no pictures of the items, making people less interested in that section. It affected how much people engaged with that part of the page.
• Also, the words used were more about the product than what the customer might like. The words didn’t make customers curious or give them good reasons to think about buying the product.

A daring redesign of the cross-sell section based on these insights led to a 24.18% uplift in successful purchases and a remarkable 16.21% revenue boost. 

Here’s the full case study. 

Micro Focus identified the cause of the low form completion rate with form analysis: no indication of mandatory fields

In the intricate realm of digital transformation, Micro Focus, a stalwart with almost five decades of history, embarked on a journey to redefine success in a dynamic marketplace. The team championed optimization efforts across Micro Focus’s digital properties. 

The goals were crystal clear for this seasoned team— Home page enhancements, revenue page elements, and an overall superior user experience were top priorities.

Deep-diving into user interactions using VWO Insights’ heatmaps, scrollmaps, and session recordings, the team unearthed critical observations. Mandatory form fields lacked asterisks, free trial CTAs were below the fold, and the Marketplace domain needed product linkage for traffic flow.

When these crucial issues were addressed,  a 12.37% uplift in form completion rate and a 124.13% increase in traffic to revenue-generating product pages were achieved. 

Here’s the full case study. 

IMB Bank identified the friction that led to high drop-offs on their website pages and form: lack of instructions, uncertainty around USP, and missing social proof

IMB Bank, a financial stalwart since 1880, leveraged VWO to uncover hidden engagement opportunities and boost conversions by a remarkable 87%. 

User behavior research using VWO Insights – Web, including heatmaps, funnel analysis, form analysis, and session recordings, guided the team. The results spoke volumes:

Personal loan conversion rate: A stellar 36% increase.

Home loan conversion rate: Soared by an impressive 87%.

The team ran two campaigns:

Campaign 1: Personal loan application form – 1st page optimized

Addressing a high drop-off rate on the first page identified by VWO Insights – Web, elements like USPs, awards, time indicators, improved design, and clear instructions were introduced. The result: a 9% increase in form completions, later escalating to a 12% YoY boost.

Campaign 2: Personal loan application form – exit popup

Analyzing an 84% drop-off before completing the form, an exit popup was employed. While not impacting form completion significantly, there was a surge in users saving the form. Recognizing the need for additional information, the ‘save’ option proved highly impactful. Post-implementation saved forms and resumed completions soared by 37% and 250%, respectively.

Here’s the full case study.

What clients say about VWO Insights

The surveys, session recordings & heatmaps features appeal to us the most. Knowledge and customer data are king and these two features shape our roadmap as to what we prioritize for development and initiatives we work on. At the moment we are using surveys as the primary source of behavioral insight. This then shapes what the priorities are for features for our customers.

Alice Michael, Group Head Of Ecommerce Operations at APG & Co, attests to the significance of VWO Insight’s features in steering their company initiatives.

Decoding customer behavior with innovation

In essence, VWO Insights – Web acts as a conduit between businesses and their customers, transforming raw data into meaningful narratives. By understanding customer behavior through surveys, session recordings, and heatmaps, businesses gain a nuanced understanding of their audience. This deep comprehension, in turn, fuels informed decision-making, targeted improvements, and a customer-centric approach that fosters long-term success.

VWO amplifies the power of its user behavior analytics with its “Insights Dashboard”. This dashboard helps accelerate the optimization velocity of teams. How? By helping users zoom in on user struggles on their website without having to comb through terabytes of data collected by VWO Insights.

The Insights Dashboard comes with important enablers like the Experience Overview and Friction Trend, measuring metrics like ‘Rage clicks’ and ‘dead clicks’ to create a ‘friction score’ indicative of user struggle. The ‘experience score’ reflects user satisfaction, aiding in identifying and prioritizing UX issues. It enables the identification and resolution of page-level issues through instant analysis, associated heatmaps, and session recordings.

The dashboard facilitates the proactive identification of dissatisfied user segments and offers concise summaries of form performance and surveys. With diverse use cases, such as comparing experiences after page optimization and boosting product sales through experience enhancement, the Insights Dashboard becomes an indispensable tool for quarterly holistic reviews, providing a comprehensive understanding of website health.

With VWO Insights – Web you can also leverage a groundbreaking Generative AI update, enhancing survey capabilities with two innovative features. The AI-powered Survey Creation allows users to specify goals, generating tailored questions to uncover insights like customer preferences or product feedback. The process is iterative, enabling the regeneration of questions until the ideal survey is achieved. 

The AI-generated Survey Reports offer quick comprehension through enhanced summaries, including feedback comments. The AI analyzes survey feedback, providing actionable suggestions for improvement. Key benefits include efficient survey crafting, seamless question regeneration, and a deeper understanding of the audience. Currently, in beta, users can enable this feature by contacting support@vwo.com.

Additionally, VWO Insights – Web unveils an advanced filtering feature, empowering smarter decision-making by allowing users to effortlessly pinpoint issues affecting specific visitor cohorts. With unlimited filtering capabilities, standard filters, and custom attributes, users can streamline the analysis process, saving valuable time and enhancing the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and user experience refinement.

VWO’s vision is to build products that help customers improve their websites by giving them smart solutions and useful information about their visitors. The newly launched features are therefore a step in the right direction. At VWO, we want to help our customers not just gather data but enable them to create value about it. We want to help our clients understand and connect with their visitors in new and improved ways.

In conclusion

Visitor behavior analysis tools stand as a powerful force, bridging the gap between businesses and their customers by deciphering raw data into meaningful narratives. The implementation of VWO Insights – Web, has empowered brands like Bear Mattress, Micro Focus, and IMB Bank to fast-track their UX goals, achieving remarkable success through strategic optimization efforts. The showcased case studies demonstrate the tangible impact on revenue, conversion rates, and user engagement. Furthermore, the Insights Dashboard and the innovative Generative AI update enhance VWO’s capabilities, providing actionable insights, efficient survey crafting, and advanced filtering for smarter decision-making. 

We leave you with some love shown by our users on G2 in recent times. 

In the pursuit of some trendy sneakers, Corey thought he hit the jackpot on an online fashion store. Everything seemed perfect – the ideal pair, the right price, you know the drill. However, that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

Upon clicking ‘Add to Cart,’ Corey confronted a dreaded account registration form. Numerous mandatory fields stared him in the face, and there was no quick option to log in with Google or Facebook. Given the morning rush, Corey wasn’t in the mood for a digital obstacle course. So, he decided to bail, thinking he’d just grab those sneakers from his usual store in the upcoming festive season.

As someone working hard to increase sales from your website, doesn’t it bug you that the e-commerce store missed out on a seriously promising lead? I mean, Corey visited from a search engine, so the SEO game was on point. Plus, he liked the sneakers and their pricing – total green lights for customer and product research. But then, bam, the website experience drops a red cross and just kind of ruins the vibe that other teams worked hard to build. 

If you find yourself empathetic to the described situation and want to steer clear of a similar fate for your website, it’s time to consider diving into behavior analytics. Also, if you find yourself in the dark about the intricacies of user behavior analysis and how it could be a solution, then this blog post is for you.  

We’re going to break down behavior analytics for you. We’ll start by introducing the concept, walk you through how it works as per business objectives, help you choose the right behavior-tracking tool, and why you should consider VWO for behavior analytics. 

Let’s roll!

What is behavior analytics?

Behavior analytics involves systematically tracking visitor interactions with a website and its critical components. The goal is to gain insights into how the website is perceived and identify any pain points that visitors may encounter. For example, the online fashion store that Corey visited could analyze how he hesitated when faced with the sign-up form. This analysis serves as a foundation for devising potential solutions to the identified issues.

With behavior analytics, you can dive into the visitor activity, like mouse flow, clicking patterns, scrolling habits, moments of hesitation, and even instances of frustration. The results of this analysis are then compiled and presented visually, providing a more nuanced understanding of customer engagement and potential pain points. Behavior analysis can be done using heatmap, clickmap, scrollmap, form analytics, session recordings, and surveys. 

Here is a short intro to each of these features in case it’s the first time you are reading these terms. Otherwise, you can move on to the next section. 

• Heatmap: A heatmap is like a color-coded map showing where visitors click (hotspots in red) or don’t click (spots in blue) on a website. It’s a quick visual snapshot of what’s popular and what’s not.
• Clickmaps: This is a type of heatmap that visually displays where visitors click on your website. They show the click activity on different elements, such as CTA buttons, images, text, and URLs.
• Scrollmap: This is a type of heatmap showing how visitors scroll on a webpage. It highlights the average depth of scrolling and pinpoints visitors’ drop-off on the web page in terms of percentage (Like 25% drop-off at this point.)
• Form analytics: This tracks how visitors interact with your website forms. It reveals who completed, abandoned, or hesitated during form submissions and even provides the time visitors took to fill them out.
• Session recording: This is a feature that captures visitor actions, including clicks, mouse movements, and page scrolling, providing a playback of their journey across the website.
• Surveys: This enables you to collect insights on a specific page or entire website by conducting surveys and asking visitors questions about their experience. 

Now, let’s delve into how you can gain insights into your customers’ experience through behavior analytics.

How to tap into customer experience with behavior analytics

To grasp how visitor behavior analytics can unravel the intricacies of your customers’ experiences, let’s take a journey akin to Corey at the fashion store to buy sneakers. We’ll construct a parallel experience for each stage of the funnel and then reconvene on the other side of the table to explore how behavior analytics can be instrumental in pinpointing potential friction points.

Top of the Funnel (ToFu):

The journey kicks off with a quest for insights on sneaker shopping, guiding to the fashion store’s blog addressing “What to look for when buying sneakers.” Within the blog, strategically placed CTAs in the middle and bottom prompt Corey to venture into the product list page titled “Our Best Sneakers.”

Middle of the Funnel (MoFu):

On the “Our Best Sneakers” page, Corey peruses a variety of sneakers and engages by clicking on the “View product” CTA for the selected sneaker.

Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu):

Upon discovering the ideal pair, Corey faces the pivotal decision to click “Add to Cart,” proceed with account creation, and ultimately make the purchase through the checkout page.

Now, armed with this breakdown, let’s use behavior analytics to dissect each stage and uncover those friction points that may have disrupted the flow.

Let’s start with web analytics

Before getting into behavior analysis, you can start with web analytics. With Google Analytics, you can set a funnel exploration report for each of the steps mentioned earlier. The completion event for ToFu is clicking on the “Our Best Sneakers” CTA from the mentioned blog, for MoFu, it’s “Clicking view product CTA,” and for BoFu, it’s making the purchase.

Once the data starts rolling in, you’ll have a clear view of the conversion rate and customer drop-off rate for each stage of the funnel. Now, let’s delve into how behavior analysis can come to the rescue, especially when you identify a stage where the drop-off exceeds our benchmark. 

Here, it’s a hypothetical scenario with an elevated drop-off at each funnel stage to illustrate how behavior analysis can be the key to uncovering those elusive pain points. 

Carrying out behavior analysis

a. Low conversion rate at the blog post

Suppose the blog is acing its ranking for the chosen keyword, and there’s a substantial influx of traffic. However, a notable chunk of visitors is detouring away from the blog post, failing to progress by clicking on “Our Best Sneakers.” Which is leaving a mark on the conversion rate, dragging it below the benchmark you’ve set.

Now, armed with behavior analysis features, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and uncover the reasons behind this diversion. Starting with the scrollmap, you can see how many visitors are dropping off by checking the percentage scroll depth. The scrollmap will allow you to find what percentage of visitors are dropping before seeing the first text CTA to the product listing page.

If the scrollmap reveals a significant number of visitors dropping before seeing the CTA and validates the drop-off at the funnel, you can formulate a hypothesis. Perhaps moving the text CTA up the page or analyzing the content to ensure it remains engaging, steering clear of lengthy paragraphs or text-heavy sections, could be potential avenues for improvement.

Suppose, visitors aren’t dropping off, and the content keeps them engaged. The next stop in the analysis is the heatmap reports. 

These reports can shed light on how actively visitors are interacting with the text CTAs. If the CTA’s texts are indicated by a cool blue hue in the heatmap, it might be time to craft a hypothesis. To amp up engagement, you can consider tweaking the CTA text, experimenting with different colors, transforming it into a prominent CTA image banner, or even exploring the option of removing the CTAs and introducing a floating side widget.

So, you see scrollmaps helped in figuring out how visitors were engaging with the content, and heatmaps gave clues on how well the CTAs are doing and if their position on the page is hitting the mark.

b. High drop-off at the product listing page

Suppose, visitors are bouncing off the product listing page. In this scenario, you dive into the reports of heatmaps and clickmaps. If you spot a trend of lack of clicks on all CTAs of the listed product, it might be time to redesign CTAs to catch the eye and be super user-friendly. To double-check, you can peek into some session recordings to see if visitors are casually scrolling past those CTAs before. Also, this might help you understand the role of the product image size (whether visitors are trying to click on them to expand.)

Now, if the clickmap report on individual product lists doesn’t reveal a clear pattern or there is a significant difference in clicks between various products, you can ideate to bring the products with higher clicks up the page and bring new ones in place of the non-clicked ones. 

So you see, when you’re digging into visitor behavior on product listings with multiple CTAs, heatmaps, and clickmaps capture the overall trend of clicks. Meanwhile, session recordings precisely let you know how visitors are experiencing the page and whether those CTAs are being shrugged off.

c. Low purchase rate on the product page

If the quantitative analysis shows low purchases from the product page, start by studying heatmap and scrollmap data. This will help you understand how visitors navigate the product page and whether the add-to-cart button is getting enough clicks. If the clicks on the call-to-action (CTA) are low, consider redesigning either the CTA or the entire product page. Experiment with image positioning and CTA placement to see if it makes a difference.

If the add-to-cart CTA is performing well, move on to examining how new visitors interact with the registration form. Use the form analytics report to identify hesitation, frustration, rage clicks, and completion rates, assessing the overall form performance. If it’s not meeting expectations, brainstorm and implement new design ideas for the forms.

For a more in-depth analysis, explore session recordings to observe how visitors are filling out the form. This will provide additional insights for optimizing the registration process.

Don’t forget to use all of these features to assess the checkout page and determine if it’s user-friendly for payments. During the BoFu (Bottom of the Funnel), deploy exit surveys to gather direct insights from high-intent leads about their experience. At this stage, the response rate to surveys is high, and you get quality feedback on the most crucial stage of your funnel.  This information can guide improvements in design, pricing, and the overall checkout experience.

So, if you see, using multiple features for behavior analysis provides you with highly detailed insights into visitor behavior. These detailed observations can lead to valuable ideas for improvements or experimentation.

It’s worth noting that you don’t always have to kick off with web analytics. If you have just rolled out a new page experience, caught wind of issues through customer feedback, or noticed a decline in sales trends, you can go straight to behavior analytics. 

Your funnel might be different, but the above approach and the features used can act as an inspiration to you. Take a cue from it and strategically use these features to decode the behavior patterns of your customers or visitors. 

Now that we’ve covered the details on how to conduct behavior analysis, let’s progress to the next step: shortlisting a tool for the job.

How to choose a tool for behavior analytics

Selecting a behavior analytics tool is mainly driven by the need to address business-specific challenges, set goals, and the allocated budget for the project. In addition to these considerations, here are some guardrails to assist in narrowing down the tool.

a. Explore tools that give full-featured free trial or free plan

Securing a thorough free trial is incredibly valuable for understanding the capabilities of a prospecting tool. It offers insights into the customer service experience and how well it aligns with established practices, all without committing financially. Prioritizing such tools in the initial phase is a smart move for any business. Additionally, consider exploring tools with forever-free plans, especially if you have budget constraints or just setting up your behavior analytics roadmap.

b. Look for tools that provide instant value

Consider exploring tools that provide features with quick turnaround times. Take generative AI, for instance. Its popularity is on the rise, transforming the scale and speed at which businesses deliver solutions. Its applications are now extending to processes like behavior analytics. 

As your organization grows and places greater emphasis on behavior analytics for optimization, the manual task of sorting through each report for insights can become cumbersome. Fortunately, analytics tools are incorporating Generative AI solutions to automate insights derived from survey and heatmap reports, streamlining the entire process. It’s advisable to explore tools that offer features in this area to enhance the efficiency of your analytics endeavors.

c. Prioritize privacy-first tools

Privacy is a fundamental right of every human being, and when you are analyzing the behavior of your visitors, you must be using tools that are privacy first. Here are some features of a privacy-first tool:

• It allows data minimization, collecting only necessary information and obtaining user consent transparently. 
• Allows user whitelisting to limit account access based on user location or IP address, and access is restricted to only those designated areas.
• Offers security measures, including encryption and adherence to international privacy certifications, to ensure data protection. 
• The tool prioritizes data residency compliance. Additionally, it employs data anonymization techniques, respects deletion timelines, and incorporates privacy principles into product development, showcasing a privacy-by-design approach.
• Provides user consent mechanisms, opt-out options, and adherence to privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and others for user privacy. 

In essence, a good privacy-first tool integrates transparency, user control, and robust security practices to uphold privacy standards effectively.

Now that you have a grasp of behavior analytics and tool selection, consider exploring VWO Insights – Web, a tool with compelling reasons to be on your radar, regardless of your business stage.

Behavior analytics with VWO Insights – Web

VWO Insights – Web stands out as an all-in-one product, providing heatmaps, session recordings, form field analytics, and on-page surveys. The setup process is straightforward, and its uniqueness lies in its approach to sampling visitors. Based on the volume of visitors purchased, it uniformly samples visitors from the traffic directed to your website (or specific pages where the VWO tracking code is present). This ensures a representative set of data across a month. Each visitor is counted as unique, meaning that once a visitor is sampled, all data points for heatmaps, recordings, and forms are collected for that visitor, regardless of how many times they return in that month. This approach ensures that your quota isn’t depleted simply because someone is visiting multiple times.

To add to its sophistication, VWO Insights-Web also provides access to generative AI features, such as Generative AI-based surveys. This empowers users with cutting-edge technology to achieve success swiftly. To illustrate, here’s how it generates survey reports using generative AI, streamlining the otherwise tedious process of extracting insights from a vast dataset:

Now, let’s talk pricing. VWO Insights-Web offers a forever free plan that covers up to 5000 monthly tracked users. Once you get used to the tool, you can explore and choose from plans like Growth, Pro, and Enterprise, tailoring your selection to the specific needs of your business. This flexibility allows you to scale up according to your requirements and budget as your business grows.

When it comes to safety and compliance, VWO stands out as the only tool among its competitors that adheres to stringent standards. It complies with GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001:2013, ISO 27001:2019 certification, and SOC 2 Type II. This commitment to various regulatory and security measures ensures that your data and user information are handled with the highest level of protection and following industry standards.

Feeling intrigued? Take the leap and give it a try with a full-featured 30-day free trial. If you prefer to learn more before making any decisions, check out the fascinating success story of the 250-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica. They used VWO Web-Insights to comprehend visitor behavior and successfully increased their click-through rate by 10% through experimentation. It’s a compelling testament to the tool’s effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Also, you can get a detailed read on how VWO handles behavior analytics.

Final thoughts

Creating a website with the best practices is a solid start, but the real insight comes when visitors start interacting. Analyzing their behavior becomes crucial, as imperfections and friction points may only become evident when you put yourself in your customers’ shoes to understand their experience.

In the realm of visitor behavior analytics, we resonate with the same wisdom. 

Trying to guess what might be off in the visitor journey or what issues they are dealing with can only get us so far. 

Diving into the insights hidden within visitor behavior is crucial for making smart decisions for unbeatable business success.

VWO Insights has been a game-changer in the journey of scores of brands to help them understand their visitors’ behavior using heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and forms. 

However, with the latest upgrades, we’ve taken its potential to the next level, making the data more actionable than ever without demanding endless hours of human effort.

In this blog, we’re giving you a refresher about all that’s achievable with this capability. So, keep reading!

How do you maximize insights with heatmaps?

Heatmaps by VWO Insights – Web serves as an excellent starting point for analyzing visitor behavior. With heatmaps, one can get a visual summary of visitor interaction on the page – mainly of clicks and scrolls.

Let’s understand a use case where you can analyze visitor behavior through heatmaps. 

Consider you run a relocation service company and you want to see how your website is performing in terms of visitor behavior. As you navigate to Google Analytics 4 to review current metrics, you’re struck by the high bounce rate on service pages. To understand why this is happening, you initiate a qualitative analysis, starting with the heatmaps. 

You observe through the Clickmap that the ‘Read more’ button, intended for exploring service details, receives the least percentage of clicks on these pages (indicated by a cooler color). 

Further, you click and compare different areas to see that blue bolded text in the copy garners the highest percentage of the total clicks on the page. This indicates visitors might perceive them as anchor text links to take them to a new page. 

Next, the scrollmap indicates a consistent decline in views as visitors scroll through the page. This tells you that visitors are not even scrolling down and engaging with the section that talks about the benefits of your service.

Additionally, the heatmap on a dynamic element like the ‘Get a quotation’ pop-up reveals that visitors click the close option more than they engage with the content in the pop-up. Interestingly, in segment-level analysis, you see visitors using the Safari browser are the most engaged group on your page. 

You can download the heatmaps and even share the click area data with your marketing team to brainstorm optimization ideas. That way, your entire team can stay posted about engagement status on a webpage. 

Read our detailed article to know how to get started with heatmaps on VWO. 

A real-life example to inspire you:

Ubisoft Entertainment, a leading French video game company recognized for franchises like For Honor and Assassin’s Creed, prioritized lead generation and conversion rates for overall performance analysis. Despite strong performance on several pages, the ‘Buy Now’ page for ‘For Honor’ needed improvement. Ubisoft’s team, leveraging click maps, scroll maps, heatmaps, and surveys, discovered a tedious buying process on that particular page. Driven by these insights, the team completely overhauled the page, increasing the sign-ups by 12%. 

How do recordings help you keep an eye on visitor actions?

Session Recordings by VWO Insights – Web literally lets you watch visitors in action. What path they take, where they click, if they wait somewhere before clicking – it’s all about capturing these granular details that make our recordings a favorite among businesses.

Consider a scenario where people are actively engaging with the navigation menu on your website. You can see this through the warm red colors in the heatmaps. But the website funnel analysis shows that not many visitors are reaching the product listing pages. It makes you wonder if the visitors are having trouble finding products. To investigate, you turn to session recordings.

So, you create a view for the page and choose a segment you’d like to see recordings for—perhaps shoppers from Singapore, your upcoming market where you aim to maximize sales. 

While reviewing the recordings, you observe the visitors’ mouse movement, noticing pauses and hesitancy about selecting a product in the navigation menu. They go back and forth without making a selection. Ultimately, you come to believe that the product categories could be arranged more systematically to simplify navigation.

Additionally, you see a couple of sessions of this visitor with dead clicks where he tries to click a product but it doesn’t take him to the listing page. This is another problem area that needs to be addressed.

If the visitor has been to your website across multiple sessions, you can review recordings of their interactions in those sessions. Check other recordings, if available, to see if the same issues persisted or if new problems emerged. 

Watch recordings of other visitors in that segment to determine whether the problem was unique to the previous visitor or whether they were also hesitant and failed to click through to the product listing page.

You can even share any visitor profile with your team if you identify something interesting in their behavior that your team can glean insights from and refine their optimization efforts. 

Get details on how to create a session recording, how to interpret it, and much more in our in-depth article. 

A real-life example for you:

Pearl Only, an online jewelry store, first discovered through analytics that there was some scope for optimization on its website. Paired with this insight, the team identified that the checkout page was cluttered and distracting visitors from the main CTA. To confirm these observations, they analyzed recordings of visitor sessions on the checkout page and discovered that visitors weren’t paying attention to the USPs. Instead, they were clicking on elements that led them away from the page. Based on these insights, the team implemented changes that resulted in a 10% increase in revenue. 

How do surveys keep you up to date with customer feedback?

Surveys by VWO Insights – Web always helps you stay updated with customer feedback, and its power is now doubled with AI. 

Wondering how? Let’s break it down with an example. 

Meet Smith, concerned about the declining visitor engagement on his news publishing site, as reflected in the reduced average time spent in GA4. To uncover the root cause, he decided to set up an on-page survey.

Here’s how he gets started: Smith enters the goal ‘Ask visitors for improvement ideas’ and is presented with a series of AI-generated questions. Because this AI-powered feature lets visitors regenerate questions, Smith takes full advantage of it and finalizes a question after 3 iterations. 

Next, he selects a single text box format and sets the trigger to display the survey after visitors spend 3 minutes on the page. Of course, you can choose other triggers, like showing surveys when visitors click somewhere or when they’re about to leave the page. The choice is yours. 

Fast forward to a month later, Smith is ready to analyze the survey responses. He’s saved from the hassle of sifting through piles of responses as AI steps in to summarize the key insights. 

For instance, a key insight emerges, revealing that most visitors perceive the website as text-heavy. To enhance the visitor experience, actionable takeaways include making the site more visually appealing by incorporating multimedia elements, adopting a minimalist layout, and strategically increasing white space. 

Even if you wish to delve deeper into responses, you can do so. Let’s say Smith filtered responses specific to a segment, such as new visitors, and found some really good suggestions he thinks can be tried out.

Overall, implementing improvements based on these insights allows you to seamlessly integrate customer feedback into website enhancements. 

Are you intrigued to give it a try? Learn how to use surveys on VWO in our in-depth article. 

A real-life example for you to read:

Encyclopedia Britannica added Q&A accordions to engage visitors on their site and prevent them from searching on Google. These accordions offer helpful information related to what visitors are reading. The company identified popular articles, used our surveys to learn what visitors wanted to know more about these topics, and then created accordion features with top Q&As for each article. The result? More than 23% of visitors clicked to see answers and explore more content.

How does form analytics improve form conversions?

Have you been on the lookout for a tool that can dive deep and provide field-level analysis? Form Analytics by VWO Insights – Web has got your back. 

Imagine you have a loan application form on your finance website. Lately, there has been a surge in live chat queries about the loan form, suggesting confusion among visitors. 

Using form analytics, you dig deeper and find that the total time spent on filling out the form is unusually high. Moreover, hesitation around sharing credit history is noticeable, with a significant drop-off from this field. Visitors are also neglecting the fields where they have to enter the address.

Real-time updates reveal that the number of visitors landing on your form, interacting with it, and then dropping off is steadily increasing. Moreover, when you apply filters to identify the segment from which most visitors drop off, you notice that the majority is coming from mobile. 

This suggests that mobile visitors may encounter difficulties when filling out a lengthy form on a small screen.

These insights suggest that shortening the form by removing insignificant fields could be the solution to engage visitors more effectively.

To get the ball rolling for your form analysis, read how to set up form tracking, use the dashboard, and more in our article. 

A real-life example to inspire you:

PayU, an Indian-origin fin-tech company, wanted to reduce drop-offs from the checkout page for their merchants. All PayU had were quantitative metrics such as time duration and bounce rate. They lacked qualitative insights into the specifics of what happened on the checkout page. Leveraging our form analytics, the team identified that requiring both telephone and email addresses caused friction and contributed to significant drop-offs. In response, they promptly eliminated unnecessary fields from the form, resulting in a 6% increase in the checkout rate.

Insights Dashboard – What’s new and how does it simplify behavioral analysis?

As you can understand from the above discussion, our session recordings and heatmaps give you a full view of how visitors behave on your site, helping you make better decisions for website improvements. 

However, in the past, going through hundreds of recordings and heatmaps was needed to validate your analyses. You had to go through heatmaps for page after page or session recordings from visitor after visitor to actually derive a concrete actionable insight – where the consistent friction is and what could be done. 

Now, with the Insights Dashboard in VWO Web Insights, you can easily understand the overall visitor experience. Check average engagement scores, pages with lowest engagement scores, segments with lowest scores, and identify problems like high rage clicks or errors. 

You can use heatmaps and session recordings for the lowest-performing pages, along with other page-level details like friction trends, errors on the page, segments with the lowest engagement, sessions with the lowest engagement, and so on. The dashboard also covers form performance and survey responses for a quick overview.

By bringing actionable insights to your fingertips, the dashboard saves you time and cuts down on effort. It makes finding problems and understanding segment-level behavior for each page easier, making the analysis process smoother and more effective.

What does Behavior Analytics mean for Product Managers, UX designers, and Marketers?

Behavior analytics is a game-changer for professionals across various roles in businesses today, enabling them to get to the root of user problems. Let’s see how product managers, marketers, and UX designers leverage behavior analytics for experience optimization. 

Product Manager

A product manager can enhance feature adoption by prioritizing visitors’ input, addressing glitches, and improving the overall product experience. Leveraging behavior analytics plays a crucial role in this process that helps refine features based on visitors’ actual behavior and preferences.

Consider this: As a product manager at an executive education learning website, you’ve been tracking the adoption rate of the new “Career Find” feature through your product experience platform, Userpilot. You see the numbers are not impressive, indicating that not many visitors are interacting with the feature as desired.

Warm colors in the heatmaps indicate that visitors are most engaged with the advanced search filter, featuring multiple boxes and different selectors like location, experience level, and industry. You see this area receives the majority of clicks compared to other sections of the page. To find out why adoption is low despite many people using the filter, you check session recordings for more details.

The recordings reveal that, after entering their criteria, the page loads for 7-8 seconds, displaying delayed results. This is the first roadblock because ideally, any page load time should be under 3 seconds. 

Interestingly, visitors click through to a job page from the job listings results but often return to the “Career Find” page, eventually scrolling back to the search filter. The goal now is to understand what prevents them from fully exploring job pages and makes them go back to the search boxes. 

To understand their concerns better, you initiate a survey on the career find page, seeking visitors’ feedback on the feature and discovering areas for improvement. The survey responses provide valuable insights: visitors want additional search options such as job type (full-time, remote, internships), salary range, and skills for more relevant search results. 

Additionally, they need more comprehensive job details, including job descriptions, company information, images, website links, employee strength, and required qualifications for the post. 

Currently, just stating the company name and role expectations isn’t enough for the visitors.

You now understand what’s lacking and where improvements are needed. 

With these observations, you can enhance the feature to be more visitor-centric, thereby improving the overall experience and driving increased adoption.

UX teams

UX researchers and designers can enhance visitor flow by leveraging visual data insights, incorporating feedback, and eliminating navigation bottlenecks. Behavior analytics helps with this granular understanding by revealing visitors’ pain points, friction areas, and improvement opportunities.

A short hypothetical example can help you understand better: Emma, a skilled UX researcher at an online fashion store, observed a sudden increase in drop-offs from the cart page while reviewing the metrics in their analytics tool. This shows a clear disruption in their behavior flow, preventing them from following the expected journey on the website. 

Instead of making assumptions, Emma sought an unbiased understanding of the issues. She turned to heatmaps to understand visitors’ behavior and explore ways to improve their journey.

Emma’s observations were intriguing. Firstly, she saw visitors engaging with the product quantity selector button the most as shown by warm colors. Secondly, not only did views decrease towards the bottom of the page, but the number of clicks on the ‘Proceed to checkout’ button was also lower. This indicates that visitors didn’t scroll down and, as a result, couldn’t find the button, which appeared below the initial scroll depth on the page.

To understand the reasons behind this click behavior, she delved into session recordings. Emma observed that although visitors clicked the quantity selector button, it didn’t help remove or add products, likely causing frustration. Moreover, visitors hardly scrolled down the page to click the check-out button. Eventually, they left without knowing it was at the bottom.

These observations convinced Emma that addressing these two major problem areas can smoothen visitors’ flow toward the checkout, making it easier for them to take the actions they want to on the website. 

CRO experts and marketers

Marketers aim to boost website conversions by optimizing problematic areas, enhancing engagement, and tailoring experiences for visitors. In this regard, behavior analytics helps them understand how visitors navigate, what they like, and what might distract them from taking desired actions, impacting conversions.

Consider this: As a CRO marketer at a consulting agency, you usually monitor form submissions on its website, tracking the lead flow into the conversion funnel. Things were going well, but this time, you noticed a 12% increase in visitors leaving the form without completing submissions. 

The main culprit seems to be the field requesting visitors to share their company revenue—a new criterion for lead selection introduced by the company. It was decided to include the criterion here to filter out prospects that didn’t meet this field from the get-go. 

You realize you need to look beyond the form and understand how visitors behave before and after interacting with it to get a complete picture. You observe dense red areas in heatmaps on the navigation menu, texts, and pictures on the left, while the form on the right exhibits low engagement in cooler colors. 

For even better analysis, you watched recordings of what a visitor’s behavioral flow looks like on the website. What is distracting them from noticing the form? Is there something that they find more interesting? Watching their movements is key to solving this mystery. In the recordings, you observe that although visitors move their mouse over the form, they pause frequently, indicating hesitation. 

This made you realize that asking about the company’s revenue might be too much for them at this point. Because the drop-offs from the form were manageable or within acceptable levels before adding the specified field. Now that you know where people are having a hard time, you can optimize the form and see if it improves form conversions again. 

How will visitor behavior analytics contribute to your business?

Investing in visitor behavior analytics provides you with a wealth of actionable insights that can be translated into growth strategies contributing to the overall success of your business. 

Early detection of potential issues

Monitoring visitor behavior through analytics tools allows you to detect potential issues or roadblocks in the visitor journey early on. Whether it’s a poorly performing landing page or a cluttered form, identifying and addressing issues promptly helps maintain a good visitor experience before they start affecting your conversion rates and the bottom line of your business.

Reduced bounce rates

Analyzing visitor behavior helps spot friction points that prevent them from taking the desired actions on your website. When you address these challenges, you create a smoother experience for them, encouraging them to spend more time on your website. Visitors finding what they are looking for easily can help reduce bounce rates and, in turn, improve conversions.

Data-driven decision-making

Data is the fuel that powers your decision-making process. Hence, basing your strategies on actual visitor interactions enables you to resonate with your audience and drive more business success.

Personalization opportunities

By understanding how visitors interact with your website through heatmaps and session recordings, you can tailor content, recommendations, and various other touchpoints to their preferences. For instance, if you see a segment of visitors most engaged with your forms after applying filters, you can target them with more relevant and personalized offers to push them to the next level in your conversion funnel.

Enhanced customer retention

Understanding visitor behavior and gathering their direct feedback (surveys) can give you insights into their needs and expectations. When you use this information to enhance your website, product, or services, you align with their expectations, fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty. This way, they stick around for a long time with your brand.

Final thoughts

Cutting corners on visitor research is a risky decision that can backfire. If your offering doesn’t align with their preferences and expectations, your efforts could go to waste. Don’t you think it would be worthwhile to align it with their behavior and make them feel valued?

With the incredible capabilities of VWO Insights, why delay adding this powerful tool to your tech stack to ensure a top-notch experience on your website? If you’re on board to give it a try, start with our free trial. And if you see the value in supporting your growing business ambitions, scaling up to a paid plan is just a smart move away. Happy researching, and improving! 

It’s not uncommon to anticipate growth in A/B testing. But how did JellyTelly, an internet-based television network with a low sign-up rate on the homepage, achieve such explosive growth? Well, the agency that handled CRO for Jelly Telly started like everyone else—formulating hypotheses and creating a simplified homepage variation for the A/B test. What set them apart was their savvy move of segmenting only new visitors for the A/B test, leading to a solid uplift in results.

You might wonder what’s the deal with segmentation in the A/B test and why it makes such a significant impact.

To put it simply, segmentation is similar to the meticulous strategies employed by teams in the Big League, where they segment opponents’ team players based on recent form and performance and experiment with their gaming approach. No one-size-fits-all strategy here — on such a professional and super-competitive level, the teams adjust their game plan for both in-form and out-of-form segments of opponent batters and pitchers. This approach ensures that a team can apply strategies in different situations, understand players effectively, and utilize teammates’ potential.

Similarly, you can’t always have a general A/B testing approach when you have multiple segments of visitors on your digital platform. For example, it’s far more effective to A/B test your checkout page for frequently abandoning segments than all the visitors. Segmentation gives specific insights into visitor behavior and optimizes the bandwidth of your A/B testing tool. 

So, if you’re just dipping your toes to explore segmentation in A/B testing, you’ll definitely want to check out this blog post. We’ll cover the how-to’s of A/B test segmentation and best practices and show you how easy segmentation is when you are using a platform like VWO.

Let’s understand how to segment A/B tests.

When you’re running an A/B test, you can carry out pre and post-segmentation. Pre-segmentation is all about digging into existing visitor data to create visitor segments for a test. And post-segmentation? That’s breaking down the results you get from the test. Here are some commonly used filters to create segments for pre- and post-segmentation in A/B testing:

• Geo: USA, India, United Kingdom.
• Device: Mobile, tablet, and desktop.
• Traffic Source: Direct, search engine, referral, affiliates, social media, paid, etc.
• Activity: New visitor, returning visitor, event abandonment, event complete, etc.
• Other: Time of activity, browser.
• Custom segments: Business-specific segments.

[For instance, consider using a country filter to create segments like the US, India, UK, etc.]

Now, let’s take a closer look at how pre- and post-segmentation can be useful in your A/B testing.

Pre-segmentation: The slice before the spice

“I am seeing a rise in cart abandonment, what should I do?”

“How do I reduce that bounce rate from Japan?”

“How can I improve the completion rate of that course?”

These questions naturally pop up after digging into the website data from our analytics platform. Solving these issues might involve A/B testing with some hypotheses you come up with. Well, here pre-segmentation can come in handy. Instead of testing everything on all visitors, here is how you can solve the above problems and similar ones that you face:

“I will segment cart abandoners and run an A/B test by positioning the promotion block above the fold.” 

“Let’s A/B test Japan traffic with a translation widget in the variation.”

“Let’s A/B test low-engagement students segment with a variation having smaller duration videos.”

With this approach of pre-segmentation, you will more likely see an increase in your conversion rate, as you are targeting segments that are a key source of the problem. Even if it fails, you can move to test the next hypothesis without subjecting a larger visitor base to the experiment. Also, pre-segmentation optimizes your use of the A/B testing tool as many of these platforms charge based on the usage-based pricing model. 

Keep in mind: The effectiveness of pre-segmentation hinges on the tool at your disposal and how adeptly you handle and assimilate visitor data. Contemporary businesses lean on sophisticated solutions, such as customer data platforms (CDPs), to store and seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources. This not only enhances the accuracy of segmentation but also boosts the results of activities driven by these segments.

Post-segmentation: Unraveling the puzzle

You have finished A/B testing, and now it’s time to delve into the reports with post-segmentation. It might seem like a bit of an optional thing, but whether your A/B test hits the jackpot or takes a detour, post-segmentation is the secret sauce—it spills the beans on why things went the way they did, laying the groundwork for future improvements.

In post-segmentation, you can filter all the visitor data for a particular segment to understand how it performed or you can square off two segments like mobile versus desktop or returning visitors against the new ones, revealing the nuances in their experiences and how it impacted the conversion rate. 

Moreover, delving into post-segmentation after a test flop can bring you closer to understanding customer expectations and needs. Take the example of Uncommon Knowledge, an online education portal. They hit a roadblock in their A/B test featuring the latest design trends. Still, the post-segmentation analysis revealed a key insight: their primary audience predominantly falls within the 45+ age group, who are not used to the latest trends.

So, when you engage in post-segmentation after an A/B test, you’re not slamming the brakes on A/B tests; you’re building on them. This approach addresses the common challenge of hitting a creativity wall with A/B testing as you generate fresh hypotheses through in-depth analysis. It is a more strategic approach—what we like to call the experimentation loop—to A/B testing. In this loop, you launch a new experiment based on a hypothesis from analyzing a completed A/B test. It’s a far superior method compared to the randomness of traditional testing.

Now, let’s dive into the practical side of things and explore how to effectively carry out segmentation using a tool like VWO.

How does VWO handle pre- and post-segmentation?

Let’s understand the segmentation functionality in VWO with an example. Say you’ve got a cool smartwatch e-commerce store. In recent analytics reports, you notice a decline in the conversion rate among visitors using the Windows browser. The analysis led to a hypothesis of adding a sitewide time-based discount offer widget to see whether it uplifts the conversion from Windows visitors. You create an A/B test variation having the widget below the main menu.

With VWO, if you are thinking of running an A/B test to see the effect of this offer on visitors with a Windows browser, you can pull it off with just a few clicks, thanks to its user-friendly dashboard. Once you’ve punched in the web URL you want to test and sort out your variations and goals, it’s a breeze to pre-segment using the standard segment option tucked away in the audience and traffic section. Here is how it’s done on VWO.

Now, for the same time-based widget, if you want to kick things up a notch and dive into some advanced pre-segmentation —like you have a hypothesis to A/B test visitors who have a 60-second time spent duration on the homepage. For such use cases custom segment is your playground. You can segment users by behavior-based segments such as exit intent, time spent, and scroll-based criteria. Additionally, you can segment by location, IP address, query parameters, or anything specific to your site.

Here’s how it works:

Also, you can include, exclude, and even mash up segments for your A/B test. For example, a combined segment of people who have 60 seconds spent on the watch store homepage from Idaho. 

You can even create segments based on attributes you’ve tracked with third parties like Clearbit, Segment, etc. If you want to know more, dive into the nitty-gritty of custom segments with all the details in a knowledge-base article.

Now, let’s say you’ve conducted the A/B test for all users, and you’re keen on diving into post-segmentation using VWO to see how control and variation fared across different segments. Beyond the standard and custom segments we explored earlier in pre-segmentation, VWO has got you covered for comparing how the A/B test played out for various segments of visitors. Like, you can see how conversions from the desktop segment fared against the mobile segment. You can even compare multiple-goal performances. 

Also, imagine you’ve got a boatload of data, and you’re itching to dig deeper into specific segments. Like, maybe you’re curious to slice and dice based on countries for the mobile segment. In that case, VWO lets you slice and dice those segments with visitor dimensions, making it a breeze to unravel the nitty-gritty details of the performance. 

If you notice, VWO is like your trusted toolkit, handing you all the controls you need to finely segment your A/B tests during both pre and post-stages. If you find this intriguing and want to give it a spin, we offer a 30-day full-feature trial for a complete hands-on experience. Remember to give it a go! It’s worth mentioning here that access to some of the above features depends on the chosen plan and pricing. 

Now that we’ve got the scoop on segmentation and the tool to wield, let’s dive into some savvy best practices to make the most out of it.

Best practices for A/B test segmentation to kick off on the right foot

a. Prioritize bigger segments for A/B testing

After applying basic filters like country, age, and device in your analytics tools, spot the segment with the most visitors. Make it your A-list for testing, and break it down even more based on conversion rates.

Now, for the high-converting sub-segment, A/B testing with new features, the latest arrivals, or step up your game with website personalization. These segments are your core visitors. If an A/B test variation clicks with them, consider integrating it into the regular experience for all visitors.

For the low-converting sub-segment, dive into the analysis using user behavior analytics tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and clickmaps to pinpoint friction points. Formulate hypotheses based on your findings and run A/B tests to observe the impact on the conversion rate. It’s about diagnosing the issues, crafting solutions, and fine-tuning for better results.

b. A/B test new experiences for small segments with high conversion rates

Using the same filters as before in your analytics, you might spot small segments with a high conversion rate. This could be a sign of an untapped visitor base. For these segments, consider crafting a new experience or even developing a variation landing page dedicated to this specific segment and conduct a Split URL test. To test the waters, increase traffic through paid and social promotion to observe if the newly found visitor base maintains a consistently high conversion rate. Such an approach to experimentation helps in exploring and capitalizing on hidden opportunities.

Say, for instance, in your analysis using a country filter, you might stumble upon a small segment of visitors from Canada (a region you don’t usually target) with surprisingly high conversion rates. In this scenario, consider crafting a landing page tailored specifically for Canadian visitors and test it against your original landing page using a Split URL test. To validate your findings, run a paid promotion to drive more traffic and ensure statistical significance in your tests. If the results are promising and show a positive trend, you might consider implementing long-term strategies like content marketing to fully tap into this previously untapped market.

c. Dive into post-segmentation only after the test reaches statistical significance

The allure of stopping an A/B test midway can be strong, especially when you see a higher conversion rate for a variation, thanks to the real-time reports most tools provide. However, this impulsive decision might lead to a false positive (type-1 error) result, and conducting post-segmentation based on this premature data could lead to inaccurate assumptions for future actions.

It’s wiser to let the A/B test reach statistical significance before diving into post-segmentation. Market-leading tools like VWO showcase significance in their reports, but if your tools don’t showcase it, then you can turn to online statistical significance calculators to make informed decisions about stopping the A/B test. Patience can save you from hasty conclusions and guide you toward more accurate insights.

d. Combine segments to get more precise with your experiments and results

As your business expands and website traffic surges, it becomes crucial—and almost mandatory—to merge segments for both pre and post-segmentation in A/B testing. For example, instead of solely running an A/B test or analyzing reports for people residing in Idaho, consider this: for pre-segmentation, it’s more effective to create a combined segment of individuals living in Idaho using the Safari browser. With a more targeted pre-segmentation, you’re not just scratching the surface; you’re delving into the nuances of a specific group, enhancing the precision of your testing strategy.

Now, when it comes to post-segmentation with combined segments, you gain a richer understanding and key insights compared to broader segments, especially when dealing with a high volume of visitors. It’s about fine-tuning your focus to extract more meaningful information from the data deluge. 

Note: VWO lets you combine segments via its custom segments feature. Here is a screenshot of it. 

Final thoughts

Segmentation is a fantastic addition to your experimentation mix, significantly elevating your understanding of visitor behavior. Incorporating both pre and post-segmentation into your strategy can be a game-changer. However, finding the right approach for your business might take some experimenting. The learning curve can be steep initially, and you might encounter deviations from your assumptions.

But here’s the key—keep building your road based on the data you acquire. Soon enough, you’ll witness the potent impact of segmentation driving your A/B testing programs. It’s a journey worth taking for the valuable insights and optimizations it brings to your A/B testing game. 

Frequently Asked Questions

But you know what? The real work begins now! Promoting your content and affiliate link. With tons of content on the internet these days, it’s indeed difficult to garner your audience’s attention. On top of it, getting your audiences to click the affiliate link is even more challenging. 

Fret not, we’re here to help you. In this blog, we tell you how to promote your affiliate content and links so you get the most returns out of your efforts. Let’s get started.

Leverage your list of email subscribers

Your email list is a valuable asset. By building your email list, you own customer data without being at the mercy of third-party data providers and therefore control your communication with your subscribers. This ensures that your loyal fans receive your message without worrying about algorithm changes or policy changes on external platforms.

So, don’t delay and explore different ways of incorporating links in your newsletters. Create content that’s solely meant for promoting our product. Alternatively, you can include the link in non-promotional yet informative content. Let’s say you prepare a list of martech stack tools you tried and loved recently and you include the VWO platform in the list. The key is to make the link flow naturally within the content and position it prominently. 

Need inspiration? Pat Flynn is a big name in the affiliate industry and who better than him to inspire you? Look below how he chose to promote a software product and the corresponding affiliate link in one of his newsletters. Reads easy and organic, right? Also, he doesn’t miss a chance to promote his eBook while mentioning why he thinks reading it can help his audiences. 

Make the most of your blog posts

Including the affiliate link in blog posts is one of the oldest and proven strategies to promote affiliate marketing links. But some wonder if it’s even relevant in the times of digital boom and cut-throat competition with 32 million bloggers in the US alone. Surprisingly, the fact that 77% of people still read blogs online shows that blogs are still an important source of knowledge consumption and should be made the most of to reach more audiences. To establish trust with your readers, your blogs must be based on original research and reflect your authority on the subject. 

Your next goal is to make audiences click your affiliate link without making them feel compelled to do so. One way to achieve this is by putting the affiliate link in the content to make certain words clickable. See the two options below and decide which one you like as a reader:

1. Click https://vwo.com/free-trial/ to unlock the true marketing potential of your business.
2. Take a full-featured trial of VWO to unlock the true marketing potential of your business.

Of course, the second option is easier to read and more user-friendly as it weaves smoothly into your content. On the other hand, the first option looks a bit forced and when read in a flow, it can stand out as the right affiliate link promotion tactic. Inserting your affiliate link organically in your content is an art that you get better at with practicing. 

Influence customer decisions through product reviews and tutorials

Users reading product reviews and tutorials are usually said to be in the final stages of making a purchase decision. Now that they’ve done their research, they want to get their hands on a tool that will help them solve their problem. This is where promoting your affiliate link through reviews or tutorials that highlight your first-hand experience with the product becomes so important. 

Don’t hesitate to go analytical. Explain what you like about our VWO products and why you like them better than other tools you tried before. And precisely for this kind of content, place affiliate links toward the end of the content. Why? When the affiliate link is placed toward the end of the product review, it shows that your priority is providing an honest and informative review of the product.

John Chow is a superstar in the field of affiliate marketing, having earned millions in this industry.  Here’s an example of his way of promoting AWeber email marketing software. He ditched the usual long-form copy content and shared a video where he explained how to write for an automated email campaign using AWeber. And it’s only towards the end that he mentions that AWeber is offering a 30-day free trial for new customers. And like any smart affiliate marketer, he also promotes his personal content on a free video course at the bottom. 

Spread the word on social media

If you want to promote your content on social media, there are different formats you can experiment with! For example, try posting articles and snippets on LinkedIn or go for reels on Instagram and long videos on YouTube. Joining groups and communities on social media platforms – be it LinkedIn or Facebook – is also a great way to connect with potential customers and share your content with like-minded audiences.

But there are also nuanced differences in the different types of content you create. For example, creating content for reels and videos is fundamentally different. Reels are all about being concise and entertaining, while long videos give you more room to showcase your skills and knowledge. For instance, you could create a brief reel providing an overview of VWO Insights, and then elaborate on the details in a longer YouTube video.

When it comes to link placement, you can add them in the descriptions along with a few lines on the product you’re promoting. And since Instagram doesn’t let you add links to descriptions, don’t forget to keep updating the link in your bio as and when new affiliate content comes up.

While sharing affiliate links directly on forums like Quora and Reddit is considered spam, you can still include links to your content in your answers to questions. This way, you can attract potential customers without coming off as too pushy.

Don’t leave out podcasts and webinars

The recipe for successful affiliate link promotion remains the same even when you’re creating podcasts or webinars – create high-quality content and include relevant affiliate links in the description.

For instance, imagine you’re a digital marketer who hosts podcasts on marketing trends. In one of your episodes, you emphasize the significance of conversion rate optimization and share your trust in VWO for testing not only your website but also those of your clients. Simultaneously, you include your affiliate link in the description.

Dough Cunnington, an affiliate marketer, runs his podcast show called The Doug Show. In one of his episodes, he discusses prompt engineering with another expert and includes affiliate links for two AI products he endorses in the description. While he has kept the description quite straightforward, you can explain a synopsis of the podcast of your episode, so users can feel the context in which you’re promoting a particular product without having to listen to the entire episode. 

Maximize reach through short videos

Short-form video content, exemplified by platforms like TikTok and Instagram, has revolutionized our way of online content consumption. Today, we crave concise, creative, and personal content that helps us save time by sharing only the necessary information. 

Now, don’t downplay the effort required to create this content only because it’s brief. You’ve to work on creating engaging content infused with authentic storytelling to hook your audience. Your content should do a good job of piquing audiences’ interests and making them eager to explore the products or services you’re promoting. And to do that in a few seconds is not a cakewalk. 

If you regularly update your product reviews, place the latest affiliate link in your Instagram bio, and be sure to mention it in your posts or stories. Also, you can use hashtags to help broaden your content’s reach. 

Over to you

It can be quite challenging to cut through the clutter and promote your affiliate content and links to the right set of audiences. But hang in there! It might take some time, but when you have a solid plan, you can stay assured of great results and succeed as a VWO affiliate. We hope you found our tips on promoting your affiliate content and links helpful! Now that you have all these tips, it’s time to put them into practice, catch your reader’s attention, and watch your commissions soar. Good luck with your affiliate marketing journey!